


On the Brink

by galacticproportions



Series: The Ripening Stars [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action and intrigue, Consent with a Force user seems like it would be very complicated, Everything is a mess, Force-Sensitive Finn, Medical Emergency, Multi, Skywalker Siblings, Threesome - F/M/M, midnight blowjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 10:04:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6562114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's great to mean well, feel love, and be brave. But it's not enough. And this is the worst possible time for the three of them to come apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Brink

**Author's Note:**

> This comes after "Decision Days" and "Faces and Masks." Probably these should be chapters rather than a sequence, but I'm too lazy to fix it. There will be two more of them after this, if that helps.
> 
> As always, thanks to the lynx-eyed Nevanna for beta help, especially with characters' motivations, and to those who've read and responded so far!

"Brujita," Poe murmurs and kisses her forehead in the grey-dim light. "See you later, there's a pilots' briefing and I need some caf first." Finn is still asleep, Rey thinks, but turning her head she sees his eyes are open, and Poe bends back down to kiss him too. Then he's putting on yesterday's clothes and gone, and Finn is snuggling back into her side.

Having him there feels so right, so _fitting_. In the years when all she had was herself, she hadn't know it was possible to make room for another person this way. To move over, inside yourself, for them. She needs him. It frightens her; she feels and resists the pull of other versions of herself, alone, complete and towering, needing no one: the person she pretended to be, the person she had to be.

With Poe, it's different. They'd built up something fragile while waiting to get Finn out of his undercover mission, but she mostly kissed him the first time to give herself courage to do something even crazier. And it worked, she reminds herself; they're here, alive, together. The same power that Poe was scared of (that she was scared of) had helped them get back. She's also trying not to think about how it's exciting, a little, that he's scared of her, and anyway he didn't seem scared just now, or earlier--

She'd come back from the training session with Luke full of resolve: no more sex till her shielding improves, tell them both so they can make their own decisions about what to do, and keep a little distance to make that easier. Then when she was on the way back to her quarters, Finn heard her footsteps, stuck his head out the door, and asked, "Sleep here tonight?" and her will evaporated like Jakku rain. Standard-issue beds can just take two, but three isn't a real option, so they woke Poe from his doze, moved Finn's bedding onto the floor and dragged Rey's down the hall to join it, before collapsing back into the resulting pile.

Any resolve that was left disappeared when she woke at the bottom of the night to see Finn laid out in the moonlight, trying and failing to be quiet under Poe's mouth. She lifted up on an elbow to get a better look, and Poe noticed her noticing and raised his head and grinned and said, "You wanna try? It's fun, you get to hear the sounds he makes."

She tried to catch Finn's eye in the dark. "Is that okay?"

"Yes _please,_ " Finn said, and Poe moved aside for her. He was right, it was fun. After a while Finn lifted her chin gently and said, "Want me to do that for you? You taste so good," and there went most of the rest of the night. When they fell asleep finally, the moonlight was fading. Now the light is starting to come in, and they haven't been back from the First Order space station for 24 standard hours yet.

"What's that word he said?" Finn mumbles, so close she can feel his lips on her neck, which makes her press closer. He reaches to trace her collarbone, draws a circle around one nipple with his fingertip.

"It's--mmh--in his mother's language. A bruja is a witch, and the _ita_ part means a little one of them, I think."

"What's a witch?"

"A woman who has... strange powers."

Finn laughs. "That's you, all right." He half-lifts, half-rolls her on top of him and holds her shoulders up so he can look into her face. "Over me you do, anyway."

She looks back down at him looking up at her, warm and bright, his sweet mouth still half-holding the shape of his smile, and her heart feels seized and pierced and bound. She says, "I have to tell you something."

 

*

 

On his way to the general briefing, Poe is feeling pretty good. He's proud of his team: they're working better together than they ever have. They're asking smart questions, and their ability to take each other's cues in flight is sensitive and sharp. Whatever the General decides the Resistance should do about this space station, he'll probably get the chance to fly, which means he'll get to feel like himself.

And he still is himself, undiminished. He let Rey touch his mind--challenged her to do it, even--and sure, it's unsettling, what she can do. But when he got out of bed this morning and looked at her face, soft in sleep and pressed up to the shoulder of the person he loves most, he felt no fear at all and no regret, just tenderness. Leaving her and Finn entwined so trustingly he'd thought: maybe we can make this work, the three of us. Whatever it is, whoever we are.

As soon as Poe enters the war room and sees the two of them standing there, stiffly and separately, he knows something's gone wrong.

General Organa's strategy team is there, and all the squadron leaders, and everyone who's captain or higher in the ground troops, and a few more people who are primarily spies. Eya Mosse is there, looking as fresh as a windflower, even though she can't be any better rested than Poe is--well, maybe a little better rested. He grins to himself but cuts the grin off short, since neither Rey nor Finn is looking at him or each other.

The General and her team have had a day and half, and probably the night in between, to work with the information that Finn and XP-0193 brought back from the First Order space station. This includes the fact that a sizable portion of the First Order thinks Finn and XP-0193 are on their way to Snoke in the custody of Sarai Ren, who now exists only in the form of a few cut-up fire blankets and a wad of engine grease and hair in a shower drain. And in the minds of the people who saw her, and heard her, and felt her power, which was the only real part of her.

By pretending to be a Knight of Ren, Rey had saved Finn and XP-0193, which meant, in a way, she'd saved the mission. Intel about the First Order's next move? Check. A little carefully seeded misinformation about the Resistance? Check. Possibly deconditioned stormtroopers? Check, though Finn admits he can't be sure about it. None of that would have survived if they'd been cornered into destroying the space station with Finn and XP-0193 and everyone else on it.

On the other hand, Poe already knows that there's a strong and vocal faction within the Resistance that thinks they should've lit up the station first thing, once they knew where it was, rather than try anything tricky. He suspects that there's a strong overlap there with the people who think the General's a fool for trusting Finn and the other two ex-stormtroopers as much as she does. Those people might not have minded if Finn and XP-0193 were on the station when it blew, if it had blown. He knows he should worry about this--not just the hostility, but the potential fractures in a fighting force that's already on the ramshackle side--and he will worry, just as soon as he figures out what's wrong with Finn and Rey so he can stop worrying about that.

Admiral Statura is speaking and gesturing, evoking responses from a holochart in the center of the room. "The station is here," he says, and a red dot appears. "It's roughly between two systems. This one has been under First Order control for about five standard years, with very little pushback anymore, and as such, it hasn't been a priority for us. What Finn heard on the space station is that they're planning to move into this smaller system here, which is at least nominally neutral at the moment. Based on the information we have, the First Order will do what they usually do: invade the planets and moons, set up a base on each one, and strip the worlds of material resources--and children, who they're planning to train and condition on the space station. Do you know why on the space station, by the way, Finn, and not on one of the worlds?"

"Isolation, sir," Finn says in a voice Poe's never heard from him, heavy and dull. "Nowhere else to go."

"Thank you. They wouldn't be planning this if they didn't have the numbers to do it, and Finn and XP-0193 have confirmed that most of what they need in terms of personnel are on the station already, but we don't have a firm timeline. I don't need to tell you that this is something we'd like to avoid, both on a sentient and a galactic scale. Tyek, what can you tell us about this second system at present?"

Tyek's feelers quiver as le gestures at C-3PO, who translates. "There are three rock planets, two gas giants and an ice dwarf planet orbiting a double star. The rock planet furthest from the sun and two or three moons of each gas giant are inhabited by sentients."

"Humans?" a human asks. "That seems to be all the First Order cares about."

Tyek's lower third eyelids rise briefly and drop, leir version of a glare. "Some humans, some others, some mixed populations," le says through C-3PO. "And I'll remind you, Burke, that the settled policy of the First Order is to purge nonhuman sentient populations. The gas giant moons share a government; they're highly industrialized and have volunteer armed forces, though no standing army or fleet. The rock planet, Eregi, seems to be mainly pastoral and not much is known about it, other than that it presumably has some sort of nonaggression arrangement with the gas giants. It seems to me that it would be the one they'd choose to attack first."

"Do we have a relationship with them?" a Mon Calamari officer inquires.

"Negative. They're aware of us, of course, as we are of them, and a few former inhabitants of the system have joined us here--I think you can confirm?" This to the infantry officers and the representatives of the medbay team, who nod. "I'll want a full list tomorrow morning," Admiral Statura says to one of the officers in charge of registering personnel. Tyek is going on, but Poe can't concentrate. Rey is all straight tight lines--her mouth, her spine, her shoulders--and Finn is so still he might almost not be there at all. He's starting to suspect what this might be about, and the voice that's hoping he's wrong is almost but not quite as loud as the one that's telling him it's his fault.

Poe hears enough to understand that there are two plans on the table: one is a mission to warn and, if possible, to train and arm the inhabitants of the rock planet, and the other is another attack on the station itself: the First Order may delay their invasion if they don't have a place to bring their captives. The higher-ups are arguing about limited resources, spreading personnel thin, projected outcomes and unnecessary risk of life; they're looking at vectors and topo maps of planets and lists of statistics. Poe is looking at what he's afraid he's about to lose.

The briefing doesn't end with a firm choice between the two plans; actually, it doesn't seem to end at all, but the General dismisses everybody but her top aides, instructing them to return at 0600 the next morning, and asks Rey to "please find my brother and tell him to come see me." Rey nods as if her neck were made of glass, and leaves quickly. Poe makes his way over to Finn.

"What is it?" he asks. "What happened?"

"You could have told me," Finn says.

This is the moment when the realization that's been brewing in the back of Poe's awareness surfaces in its full, sickening glory. It's one thing to invite what you're afraid of into your own mind, to face fear there, to choose it for yourself, but he had forgotten--literally forgotten--that his mind wasn't the only one involved. That he might not be the only one who was afraid.

"I was gonna ask her to tell you," he says. "I didn't--I did know, but when we got back, I got carried away. I wanted to touch you both so bad, and I didn't even really remember until halfway through, and then it just didn't seem as important as being together."

"Important," Finn repeats. "It's my _whole body._ It's the _inside of my head._ There was such a long time when none of that was mine, and then I made it mine--you helped me do that, I thought you knew what that meant. I thought she did. She _said_ she did."

"Finn, I don't think she does it on purpose."

"But you told her to. You told her to, and I didn't understand it, I thought it was just the kind of thing you say in bed, and then I didn't think _anything._ I didn't have a choice. You didn't give me a choice." Finn breaks off and it gives Poe time to realize that people are studiously not looking at two-thirds of the pride of the Resistance (or its biggest security risk, depending who you ask) having a fight with itself in the corner. "I love you both," Finn says, and as that sinks into Poe's mind Finn's already going on, "and I trusted you, but I can't. I can't." He turns and leaves the war room, leaving Poe standing like a ship whose engine has died.

 

*

 

Luke is in his quarters, and opens the door for her with a gesture, which just makes Rey angrier and more miserable. She says, "General Organa says will you please come see her," and turns to leave quickly, but can't. He holds her with his will, and she struggles, but he's so much stronger. He says, "You need to tell me what happened."

"Let go of me. Let go."

"Let your anger go first. The way we practiced." She gathers it all together, feels it in her core like a bar of some white-hot alloy, and it would be so easy to just wield it like she does her staff, to strike outward--

She lets it go, her breath a hiss. Where _does_ it go? How can something feel so complete, so whole, fill her so completely, and then be gone? It must land somewhere, hurt someone. Luke's grip on her eases off rather than dropping so that the inertia from fighting it doesn't make her fling herself across the room, and she hates him for thinking of that, and she hates herself for hating him. She says, "Finn hates me. He says it was wrong to--to let him feel what I felt, he says I made him, and he says I broke my promise."

"What did you promise?"

She remembers lying in bed with Finn as the evening came down when she got back from Ahch-To, before the mission, before they'd kissed even. It aches. "I said I'd never be in his mind unless he invited me."

"You understand why he's angry, then."

" _Yes,_ I fucking well understand!"

"You've never had to apologize to anyone you hurt before. You never needed their forgiveness." _Shut up,_ she thinks, _shut up shut up_ , not caring if he hears, but if he does he's ignoring her: "Loving someone doesn't keep you from hurting them," he goes on, and his voice is tight with memory. "It ought to, but it doesn't. That goes for everybody, Rey, but it's more true for us, because of our power. That's where the idea that a Jedi shouldn't love anyone comes from. We have so many more ways to hurt people."

"Maybe it's right then!" she shouts. "Maybe I was stupid to try. Maybe I should just take myself off." _Maybe this is why they left me._ Luke winces--that, he heard--and he says, "That isn't why. You were a baby, Rey, a child. You couldn't have hurt anyone."

"Ben did."

Not a muscle on Luke's face moves for long moments. "You aren't like Ben," he says finally.

"Maybe I'm more like him than you think," Rey says, and because he's no longer holding her, she walks out.

 

*

 

There is nowhere left in the galaxy for him to go.

That's what Finn keeps thinking, keeps knowing, as with automatic motions he returns Rey's bedding to her quarters and straightens up his own. If he isn't a person to Poe and to Rey, what will his chances be anywhere else? Sure, he's useful to the Resistance for his expertise and skills, in the same way he was useful to the First Order, provided he's loyal to them. If he finds a way to leave, it'll be because someone else can see the use in him.

He does want to resist the First Order, and this seems like the place, the way, at least for now. Even though that's not why he came here.

Can he still do the right thing, even when there's no one to do it for?

That's too much, he corrects himself, still moving automatically, reaching to rub selva nut oil into his scar, rinsing his mouth, running a laser shaver over his chin and jawbone. He doesn't want Poe or Rey to die. He still wants to protect them. He doesn't want any of the people here to die--Dr. Kalonia and the other medbay staff who brought him back from near-death; General Organa, who took a chance on him; Hadrian Serrit, who handles the Resistance armory and seems to have unofficially adopted Tiesse, his fellow ex-stormtrooper. The pilots, the console jockeys, the infantry, the ground crew. He cares what happens to them, whether or not they care what happens to him. And he doesn't want every kid, or any kid, on Eregi to be rounded up and stunned and awakened in a cold and echoing place that's just the beginning of their new and terrible life. He's willing to work against that.

But he'd started to let himself believe--and this was a mistake, he realizes now, this was a weakness--that there was going to be some kind of reward, or respite. Something slow to build and yet grasped at desperately, something that if it ended would only end because it was ripped from him by the thing he's trying to fight. Not something that would end itself from the inside. His hands are shaking, and he holds the laser in one place too long and it burns him a little.

Finn would have burned off his own hand before he'd treated either of them carelessly.

The numb emptiness he hasn't felt for a while is closing in again. He can feel its approach but can't figure out how to stop it. D'Qar's sun is down and the moons not yet up. He can't remember when he last ate, but he can't see himself in the mess with people laughing or talking earnestly all around him, patting the seat beside them or turning a shoulder to him. Same with the training room--even crossing the grounds of the base seems impossible. He does a series of stretches and strength exercises, tries (as he often has) to meditate the way Rey does, gets into the bed that still smells like Poe a lot and Rey a bit and tries to sleep.

He's in the woods again, the snow whispering down, slower than snow has any right to fall, and the figure in nightmare black is advancing on him. In his hands, the cold metal of the lightsaber warms and springs to violent life. He knows that if the mask comes off he'll see Rey's face. He wakes gasping in a sweat-soaked bed, the afterimage of a blue-white glow across his vision, calling the tears out.

In the morning he learns that Statura has assigned him to the team in charge of attacking the First Order space station. He goes to the imaging room and describes the station layout to a very young woman with a sharp crest of hair and a stylus: as she draws, it appears in the air in front of them in lines of glowing blue, personnel movements and routines marked out in orange, docks edged in purple, officers' locations sparks of red. Key areas brighten as she taps them again and fade when they're no longer under discussion.

This is a use of tech Finn's never seen and he feels a glimmer of real interest--what else could it be good for? Through the web of glowing lines he glimpses Eya Mosse; he doesn't know her well but he knows she was piloting the freighter that covered this last mission. Apparently while they were waiting she used a periscope that Rey rigged to take some long-range readings, and she's supplying some additional details about the exterior of the base that Finn wasn't able to ascertain on the way in. Different aspects of the drawing bulge or shrink. Additional weapons bays that Finn missed appear in bright poisonous green, slung under the inner torus and arrayed around the Needle, the long vertical core of the station. "That's bad design," he says. "Their main power source is in the Needle. If they have firepower down there too, any attack is gonna blow it up twice as fast."

"Could you tell if it was shielded, Mosse?" the Admiral asks.

"Couldn't figure out how to get the periscope to take shield readings. But I'd be surprised if it wasn't. If we'd had to go with plan B, I was thinking I'd aim the freighter at the--what'd you call it, the Needle?--anyway, because even with shielding it seems like it'd be vulnerable to plain old brute force, knock it off-kilter and maybe throw off the gravitational balance between those asteroids, let one of them suck it in." She turns to Poe, Jessika and Iolo, there with Eya to represent the pilots. "Any reason why we can't go back and do that?"

Finn has edged around slightly so that there's a glowing red spot blocking his sight of Poe's face, but even the sound of him turns Finn's guts over with fury and longing and misery. "I'd be worried about the approach," he says, his voice flat and weary. "Last time, they didn't know we were there and didn't expect us. Even if they haven't figured out that Rey wasn't who she said she was--and we don't know what kind of communication they're in with their leaders--they know something went wrong, for Finn and XP-0193 to be in there at all, and I'd expect them to range a lot wider with their security."         

"Agreed," Statura says. "Whatever plan we make obviously has to include getting close enough to execute it. I'm also wondering how much mass a projectile would need--if a freighter or the equivalent would be enough, or if we'd need something bigger. Iimi," this to the stylus-wielder, "can you port that over to Simulations and tell them what we're looking for?"

"Angles of approach, angles of impact, mass, velocity," she agrees, and does something with the stylus; the image sucks into itself and winks out. She frowns at her comm bank. "They say half an hour."

"Let's make it an hour," the Admiral says. "Go get something to eat and reconvene in Simulations." The room breaks up in clumps and trickles. Finn keeps people between himself and Poe, doesn't look at him, doesn't think about him. Waits in the mess line, grabs hyfruit and rice balls, takes them to the garden. Tiesse is often there but isn't now; the rows of neatly set-in seedlings and the staked-up humbean vines show where they've been working. He eats without tasting, keeping an eye on the time, and pulls a few weeds before forcing himself back.

 

*

 

Leaving's the work of a moment.

Rey strides up to the hangar, smiles at Teru and Kimal, says, "Open the doors for me, will you?" with just a little bit of emphasis, and as they go to do it she swings into the TIE fighter and powers up. It's more of an effort to simultaneously lift off and slow their reactions, but she manages it and is even surprised at how _possible_ it feels, and then she's clear. She releases her grasp but doesn't look down to see them startling into motion again.

It felt good, seeing them move or halt in response to her will, and recognizing that pleasure in her own power confirms her decision. She shouldn't be here. This isn't the place for someone like her.

Rey exits the atmosphere and hangs for a moment, D'Qar below her like a jewel set in fog. Its sun; the stars; the void. She opens her mind entirely, seeking the taste of another mind. Once it sickened her; now she reaches for it, sensing its kinship to her own. She'd know it anywhere. The sweep of her awareness broadens, glittering in blackness, dizzying.

When she returns to herself, she knows where she's going. Punches the coordinates. Turns to fire, outside time.

 

*

 

The general has joined them in Simulations and watches, her face folded in concentration, as the console jockeys run one approach after another. "I don't like that one," she says. "Dameron?"

"If we could get out of hyperspace a little closer, it might work, but that could turn into a suicide mission real fast. Can we try it and see, Olal?" The vratix taps in numbers with sharp jointed toes.

The door slams open and two ground crew Poe doesn't know yet run in at speed. "General," one of them pants, "that girl, Rey, the Jedi, she's gone. She took a TIE fighter, she just--she told us to open the hangar for her and we--"

A sound at his side and Poe turns to see General Organa, her face gone gray, raise a hand halfway and fold slowly at the knees.

He sprints, slams his hand down on the comm bank. "Emergency med team to Simulations _now,_ the General's having a heart attack or a seizure or something." Gets back to her, kneels next to her. "General." Tries to remember his field medic training but it's been years, and who has a heart attack on the battlefield? He takes her hand. Feels for her pulse, which is there but spasmodic, violently here and gone. Her eyes meet his in panic.

The door again, and it's not the med team but Luke Skywalker, crossing the floor and kneeling on the General's other side. He lays a hand on her chest and closes his eyes. The air seems to brighten, somehow. And after a moment, the panic drains from her face to be replaced by wonder. "Leia, I'm holding you up. I won't let you fall. Stay with me."

Poe couldn't say how long they've been kneeling there when Dr. Kalonia and two junior medics come in, towing a hover-stretcher and carrying some kind of machine. The doctor sizes up the situation in a glance and says, "Can you keep her going while we get this hooked up?"     :

Luke's face is pale and glistening with effort but he says, "As long as you need."

"In that case, let's get her on the stretcher and over to medbay. We can do more for her there." Poe helps stabilize the stretcher while the medics gently lift the General onto it, careful not to break her contact with Luke's hand. He trails along with them to the medbay. He'll stick by her until someone tells him not to, or until she--well, that's not going to happen, so there's no point in thinking about it, or about how much the procession across the base feels like a funeral march.

The medics float her into a room that's equipped for surgery and Dr. Kalonia gives Poe a look that freezes him outside the door. While he's standing there, his back against the wall and his stomach sour and his head humming with adrenaline, he has time to be furious with Rey and terrified for her, to wish he hadn't fucked things up with Finn so that they could at least deal with this together, to have it borne home to him just how impossible it will be to maintain the Resistance if General Organa dies. She's their gravity, their power source, their sun. The cracks he's seen waiting to form will yawn open, the energy that fuels their courage and their dedication will drain. They'll be fragmented on the edge of space and the First Order will brush them aside like so much floating debris before sweeping over the rest of the galaxy.

Luke emerges and leans against the wall next to him. He smells like sweat and stress. "She's stable," he says. "They say so, and I can feel it. They're going to monitor her for a few hours and decide whether some sort of tech implant makes sense--a pacemaker, they called it."

Poe lets out a long, shuddering breath.

Luke presses his face into his hands, then wipes them down the sides of his robe. "I met my sister when we were nineteen," he says, "at the door of a prison cell. I thought I was rescuing her, and I guess I was, but about five minutes later she was saving me. And then not long after that, we were running together into danger again. And that's how it's been ever since. The one time I almost turned to the Dark Side, it was because the Emperor threatened her, and I fell for that." He winces at himself. "No pun intended. We've been apart more often than we've been together, and we've never known each other when we weren't in the middle of a fight, a war, almost about to die. But this--" he takes a long breath of his own. "That took a lot out of me."

"How long could you have kept it up?"

"If whatever they do in there doesn't do the trick, I'll stay next to her day and night and keep her heart beating until one of us dies."

"She'd hate that," Poe says, before his brain catches up with his mouth.

"Oh, I know," Luke says. "I didn't say it wasn't complicated."

They stand there for a while longer, until Poe finally has to ask it: "What are we going to do about Rey?"

Luke sighs. "I think probably the two of you are going to have to go find her," he says, and Poe startles, because he'd meant we-the-Resistance; this relative stranger seems to know a lot about his business. "What I'm trying to decide is whether I should go with you. She's--on the brink. I could feel it when I saw her, just before she left."

"The brink of the Dark Side, you mean." Poe wishes talking about the Force didn't always sound so melodramatic.

"She's very strong with the Force, and she's only just started to think of it as power. Combine that with her capacity for anger and her need for love and her anger at herself for needing it ... I think she went to find ... my nephew. But I don't pretend to know what she plans to do when she gets there, and I don't see the meeting working out well for the galaxy."

Talk about melodrama. But Poe can see his point. "You seem to know something about what happened," he says. "So maybe you also know that Finn isn't talking to me either. I don't think he'd go to find her if it was with me, and I'm not sure she'd come back with us, even if she hasn't decided it would be more fun to stalk around in a black cloak and a voice distorter and torture people."

"Then I think you know, don't you," Luke says gently, "what you need to do next?"

 

*

           

Finn doesn't look up from his tray but he knows that the person standing across the mess table from him is Poe. He always knows, always feels that it's him, warm, alive, giving off sparks almost. He wonders when this feeling will go away. Poe asks, "Can I sit down?"

He thinks about saying, _I'd rather you didn't_ , but says instead, "Sure."

"I was wrong," Poe says, sitting and launching into it. "I was as wrong as I've ever been, and I hurt you, and I'm sorry. I don't need you to do anything about that. I just want you to know that I know I did wrong."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I don't mean it's okay," Finn says, "it's not," and then he's irritated with himself for even getting into it. "I just mean, okay, I heard what you said."

"I ... okay. Thank you. For that." Silence. Finn can't be bothered to pretend to eat. "Luke thinks we need to go get Rey," Poe says after what seems like a long while.

"We meaning you and him, or we meaning you and me?"

"You and me and maybe him, he said. He thinks we might be able to find her. Before she gets into something she can't handle."

Finn thinks about saying, _I don't care what happens to her._ He thinks about saying, _I don't want to go anywhere with you._ He says, "I think she can probably handle herself."

"Luke says maybe not this time. He thinks she went to find--" Finn's heart clutches itself as he see Poe's jaw tighten. "He thinks she went to find Kylo Ren, and he says he thinks you need to be the one to come look for her."

"Why?"

 

*

 

"Are you saying I'm a _Jedi?"_

"You're not a Jedi," Luke says. They're in the medbay hallway outside the room where General Organa is, they hope, recovering after her surgery. "I'm a Jedi. Rey will be a Jedi, if she survives this little escapade and completes her training with me, and if my sister doesn't kill her when she gets back. You're Force-sensitive, and you seem to be able to use it somewhat."

"I ... no. No, I don't think so. No. Why would you think that?"

"You were able to wield my father's lightsaber. That's rare for someone who's not Force-sensitive. When you were on the space station, you called Rey, and she heard you. And Finn--your work with Tiesse. They told me a little about it. The way deconditioning works, the way you listen for the way to ask the question, then the way you ask the question that makes people answer from a deeper part of themselves. That could just be good observation and good timing, but I don't think it is. You may be able to sense Rey if you get close enough." He sighs. "I'm sorry I didn't pick up on it before. That's my fault, and when you come back, I'd like to offer you some training, if you want it."

"I haven't said I'll go," Finn points out. "Why can't you go? I'm sure you'd be better at it."

"If Leia dies," Luke says, "especially if she dies without leaving any preparations for what to do next, the Resistance will be swept away and there'll be one less opposition to the First Order in their conquest of the galaxy. I used to think that this part of it wasn't my fight, but it seems to have become mine. I need to be here, not just to keep her alive but to help her prepare the rest of the Resistance for what to do if she isn't."

He takes a heavy breath. "And to defend this place, and help hold it together, while she can't. The two of you must have seen the tensions here, the ways people are at odds--even people who believe in the Resistance and are willing to die for it aren't necessarily willing to put aside their flaws for it, or their ambitions, or just their version of the right thing to do. I don't know if they'll listen to me. A lot of the power I've had in my life has been in spite of what I tried to do, not because of it." He looks old, Finn realizes. He didn't before. "Rey is important, for what she is and who she is. I hope the two of you can work together long enough to find her. I--ask that of you."

Finn is half-expecting the void to close in around him again. It doesn't. Instead, it's like he's sinking down into _himself,_ into a place where calm is, and he can decide. He says, "I'll go."

"I will too," Poe says. "We'll need a ship, something small. And supplies. And a budget, in case we need to bribe somebody."

"Consider taking something a little bigger, and Chewbacca," Luke suggests. "He cares about Rey too, and he's good in a crisis, and being here with Leia sick is going to drive him crazy." And, Finn thinks, that way it won't be just Poe and me, alone in space with nothing to do but not talk to each other. "And Finn." Luke reaches into a pocket of the robe he wears. "Practice with this," he says, handing over a cool cylinder of metal. Finn feels his palm close around it.

 

*

 

Rey brings the TIE fighter down in a field at evening. The air is drier than on lush Takodana or steamy D'Qar, but the smell of green things still fills her with wonder. She does a quick prowl to ascertain if there's anyone else around, or their traces--there's a line of trees over toward the sunset side that could be a belt or an impenetrable forest, and a smudge on the horizon that could be a cloud but isn't. Plenty of distance between her and them; she'll sleep in the fighter and make her approach tomorrow.

Only of course it doesn't work out like that, and she's thankful for her Force sensitivity and her desert-trained light sleep, because she's on her feet and out the port and poised by the time she feels him advancing. Leaving without the lightsaber was a calculated risk, but the risk part seems much stronger now than the calculation, and despite her resolve she has to fight the urge to run, or hide.

"What a surprise," he says. He's masked and that spacewreck lightsaber of his is unkindled, so he blends into the dark horizon, but of course she doesn't need to see him to know where he is. "Come to finish what you started?"

"You said you could teach me," she says. "I'm here to find out if that's true."

"I said you needed a teacher. I didn't say it would be me. My master will teach you. Come, if you're not afraid."

 

*

 

The junior medic currently monitoring General Organa tells Poe he can talk to her. "But nothing agitating, and don't be surprised if she doesn't respond. We're doing everything we can to help her, and she's helping herself by conserving her resources. I'm gonna be in the room, and if I do this--" xe draws a prehensile finger across xir tracheal stoma--"you cut it short and take a walk."

The General is on her back, an oxygen mask covering the lower half of her face, pads for a heart monitor running to her chest and a drip in her left arm. It's not just the medbay light that makes her face look drained and sunken. Poe feels cold and weak to the depth of his being. "Can I take her hand?" he asks the medic.

"Her free hand, sure. Grab a chair, if you want."

Poe drags a chair over to the right side of the bed and puts his hand over hers. "General," he says. "Ma'am." No response. "I just wanted to tell you--we're gonna go get Rey. We'll find her, we'll bring her back for you, so don't worry, just--" He can't say _get better,_ that's what you say to someone with a cold or a wrenched shoulder. "We'll bring her back for you," he repeats. "Luke and the admirals have everything under control, Jess and Eya are taking over for me with the squadrons, Tyek's coaching the liaison team, everybody's on top of it." Her breathing is shallow but even; it's his that is ragged, tearing into him. He makes a deliberate effort to slow it before bending to kiss her hand, as though she were not his general but his princess. "We're gonna keep this going for you, for as long as you need."

It's not until later, when he's making the rounds, filling out the paperwork for their supply requests and waiting to talk to Hadrian Serrit about adding some firepower to the transport they're taking, that he hears what it is he's just said. He expects to die fighting for the Resistance; he's been expecting that since he deserted, and he guesses he'll go on expecting it until it happens. He's given himself to it freely, mission by mission, battle by battle, renewing the gift; he assumes he'll stop before it does, and that had kept him from wondering whether it would ever stop at all.

Then Hadrian comes out from the back room to look over the vessel's schematics and mark the places where more guns could go and frown over what they'll have to do to the controls to make the guns actually go off, and Poe immerses himself again in strategy, in logistics, in the practical and inescapable details of the next thing that has to be done.

 

*

 

Even supposing Luke is right about where Rey was going, she could be anywhere in First Order space, so the first few days involve batting around at the edge of it and coming out of hyperspace near habitable planets, while Finn listens as hard as he can. Poe and Chewbacca take turns actually at the controls of the tub, as Poe calls her, and when Finn's not listening he's practicing.

He can get the thing to work for him, to spring into a bar of murderous light, but the first time it happens he drops it because he's shaking so hard. The blade vanishes as soon as his hand leaves it, and the cylinder rolls harmlessly into a corner. He makes it over to one of the bench seats in the transport's central room, lowers his head between his knees, tries to think of nothing. Not snow, not trees, not shadows; not Rey's face, waiting beneath a mask. Retrieves the lightsaber from the corner. Tries again. And again.

Once that reaction is mostly under control, there's the problem of his muscle memory, which is all blasters and hand-to-hand. The others aren't much help, though before their fresh fruit runs out Chewie's happy to throw peels and cores into the air for him to swipe at. But the discipline itself feels good to him--settling, like some parts of the routine on the First Order space station, only without the threat of discovery and death.

Well, the everpresent and imminent threat. They tense up at the sight of a few roving patrols and try to fly casual, but no one actually chases them. Poe says that's a sign that they're a long way from where they're trying to be. "Are you _sure_ no one said anything more specific about where he was?"

"Not that I ever heard. Just that he and Snoke and General Hux were all together."

"That tight-assed prick," Poe mutters. "Not even like, 'Oh, it takes supplies however many days to get there'--nothing like that?"

"Don't you think I'd say if there was anything?" Chewie yowls impatiently from the pilot's chair. It's one of the longer conversations they've had. Poe's restrained with his limbs and his proximity; he's careful not to crowd Finn; he rarely speaks first. Finn is torn by this. He appreciates that Poe is trying. He's saddened by what feels like a diminishment of Poe's aliveness, the way he electrifies the air around him. He's still angry, shocked and bruised to the core, and even Poe's trying seems like too little too late. And he still wants to kiss Poe's mouth and shoulders, wants to kneel between his legs and taste his cock again, wants to fuck him on the narrow ship's bunk until Poe sobs his name and he feels magnetic, powerful, and whole. In some ways this feeling is the easiest to handle: he can just tell himself no, it's not worth it, and jack off in the fresher, and go back to practicing. In some ways, it's the worst.

He turns the word _powerful_ over in his mind. He doesn't know what it means, exactly, that he can use the Force, because he didn't know that's what he was doing. But it brings back all the misgivings he had about interrogating Tiesse and XP-0193, about trying to undo the conditioning of strangers, and makes them worse. He already knew he was manipulating them, that he had power over them. Would he have done it the same way if he knew just how much? What would they think of themselves if they knew, too? Would they feel the same about the selves they were remembering they had?

Finn recalls a conversation on the space station with a stormtrooper, a woman, while they were waiting their turns for blaster drill. Something he'd heard in her voice the day before--or _seen in her thoughts,_ it occurs to him now--had made him think he might get somewhere with her. He'd started with the kinds of questions stormtroopers did ask each other from time to time, low stress, familiar: what was her weapon of choice, could she believe the new rations, did she know what that bantha dung was that Captain Barca put on his hair.

The key to deconditioning, the only key that he had found, was reaching something in the person that was stronger, deeper than First Order training and mindhandling. Something they'd never destroyed, or that they'd actually cut deeper in. When his acquaintance of the blaster range kept shearing away from discussing one particular mission, he bore down in a way that it troubles him now to even remember, and suddenly she was talking about a field on Erilon 3, a field of food plants that the invasion force had trampled, a smell of crushed young grain that brought back something even more deeply buried. He'd said, "All of that is yours," and she had flinched, touched her helmet over where her mouth was. The next time they'd crossed paths, she'd turned to stare at him. The time after that, the day before he was unmasked and thrown in a cell, he'd seen her talking with another trooper. They leaned toward one another in a way that was rare in the First Order, like they were looking together at something tender. And where are they now? Dead on a mission, reconditioned for talking to him, executed for insubordination? What kind of gift did he give them?

Normally this is the kind of thing that he would talk to Poe about. Even if they disagreed about whatever it was, it would help Finn make sense of what he thought himself. And they disagreed often. The Resistance is Poe's answer to everything--sooner or later, holding each other in the late nights and early mornings (back when they still did that), trying to figure out what to do about the day that's coming--that's what it comes around to. It's his reason and his passion; it seems to be enough for him, but Finn needs something else.

They run into their first real trouble while they're scanning a three-planet system and see the shadow of a destroyer gliding out from the orbit of the second one. Finn and Chewbacca get to the gunners' positions--Hadrian and Tiesse helped them juice up the tub's firepower before departure--and Poe shouts to get ready for evasive action, just as a few TIE fighters swing out from the silhouette of the larger ship--"Like lice," Chewbacca mutters, and Finn has time to be surprised that he understood that before the world turns sideways.

It turns out that "evasive action" in what's basically a flying box is a little different than evasive action in something designed for maneuvers, and anyway Poe seems less interested in evading than in "engaging in suicidal combat". "Finn, on my mark, hit the starboard cannons, we need more propulsion on that side," and Finn gives it everything he's got and feels the sickening lurch and sweep as they go over, only to hear, "Again, I wanna come around and take at least one out--Chewie, more power to the rear engines--now fire from both sides, _go,"_ and the tub scrapes between two fighters, wings one enough so that the other can't pull up and crashes into it, and then apparently just for fun Poe takes them under the third fighter and uses the _liftoff engines,_ of all things, to come surging up and take it out from below.

"If I were them I'd send more, let's get out of here," he's saying, "unless Rey's down there, Finn, you think?" and Finn manages to say, "No, if she's down there I can't hear her," and Chewbacca guns it and they all watch the scanners for a long few minutes to see if anyone's giving chase, while Finn's heart pounds with something between flightsickness and exultation.

Poe flops back theatrically. "Don't look like that," Finn says before he can stop himself, "you know you're the best." And then, quickly, "They're gonna wonder what that was and why a ship like this was willing to engage. We should jump to the next likely system if we can." Chewie takes them into the jump and Finn tries to look away from Poe sitting triumphant and relaxed, alive and _relieved,_ like this was just what he needed.

When they're on their way again Finn practices for a few hours. He can feel himself getting defter, his instincts getting sharper and more reliable in the way that comes from discipline, and the realization that Poe's watching him sinks in slowly. That's probably good, that he didn't notice. It means that his focus is good. That's probably important. He cuts power to the lightsaber blade and says, "You need me for something?"

Poe reaches up and grips at his own hair till parts of it stand on end. "You just caught my eye," he says. "Sorry."

Finn walks to the bench seat, sits over to one side. He says, "Wanna sit here?"

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

Poe places himself far away for another person to sit in between. He says, "Chewie's at the controls. We should reach the next system pretty soon."

"Sounds good." The words are waiting for him to say them, and he decides to go with it: "That was some flying back there."

"Yeah. Thanks. It felt good to do something for a change. When you were on the space station, that was almost the worst part, just having to sit there. And now--I keep thinking about the General. How she's doing, if she's okay or--What was she thinking? Not the General, I mean. Rey."

Finn sighs. "I keep thinking maybe she left because of me."

"Because you were pissed. But you were right to be pissed. I'm with you on that."

Oh, well. Finn says, "I think about it every day, pretty much. What we had. What we _made._ You and me, you and me and her, we barely even got to--I want it back so bad. But I don't think it works like that. I don't think you can go back."

"What about forward? I mean," hastily, "I don't even know what I mean, except I know things can't be like they were before, I know I hurt you, and I know Rey did, and please don't think I'm trying to talk you into anything you don't want, or--I guess I'm just wondering if there's an option here. An after. Something that would feel different but still feel right."

Finn leans back against the wall, feeling the hum of the ship in his bones. He says, "I never had the choice to forgive anybody before. When you're a stormtrooper, if someone outranks you, they can do whatever they want, or make you do whatever they want, more or less, and it's not a question of forgiveness. However you feel, you still have to do what they say, the next time. Or even just if somebody's stronger than you."

"Wait, are you saying--" Poe sounds horrified.

"I'm not just talking about sex. I'm talking about orders, conditioning, everything. Everything you can't choose. So being angry, _staying_ angry--it feels good. In a way." He feels himself smiling a little, even. "In a shitty way. I don't know how it would feel to--to be together again. Or together different, like you're saying."

"Well," Poe says, "if you get to where you think you might like to find out, let me know," and of course that's when they return to ordinary space. "Let me listen," Finn says and closes his eyes and sinks deep into calm--it's almost easy now. Imagines removing helmet and armor, piece by piece, leaving himself open.

He says, "She's here."

 

*

 

Close up, the hologram wavers. The seated man--he doesn't look human, or like any other sentient Rey's ever seen--moves his mouth slowly, but the words seem to reach her consciousness directly without passing through her ears: "Welcome, young apprentice. Let me see your mind."

Rey draws herself down into her hot, blue-white core: anger and anguish and aloneness, a single star. The fear that no one is coming for her, compressed into resolve; the need to defend herself transformed into one long attack. Is she projecting these things, or receiving them? What she tasted briefly on the space station floods all her senses now: she feels fused, towering, whole. Entirely sufficient. Needing no one.

The presence withdraws from her thoughts and she becomes aware again of Kylo Ren looming at her left elbow, a rasping, red-sparking sensation. It takes her another second to realize that the sound she's hearing from the seated figure is laughter. "Yes, that is what it can be like for you. The wanting and the having will be the same, just an instant of your will. You'll never have to wait again. All you have to do is commit yourself to me."

The air seems to hold them all motionless. "Yes," she says. "All right."

"Yes, _master,"_ the figure corrects.

"In your dreams."

Kylo Ren tenses behind her; she feels it. But the Supreme Leader only laughs again. "Yes, and in your dreams too, little apprentice. We will dream the galaxy together."

 

           

           


End file.
